Central to both the NDP and Green party election platforms are their responses to the B.C. Liberals’ carbon tax. According to SFU economist Krishna Pendakur, the Greens got theirs right, and the NDP got theirs wrong.

The Liberals’ carbon tax started at $10 per tonne of carbon-equivalent emissions and is scheduled to rise by $5 per tonne for four years. The Greens have vowed to increase the carbon tax to $50 per tonne.

Key to the NDP’s campaign is the slogan “Axe the tax”. Party leader Carole James has promised to abolish the carbon tax and replace it with a cap-and-trade system that would set emission limits on “all large polluters”. According to the NDP election platform, if elected, the party would commit the province to a “continental” cap-and-trade plan that would provide a foundation on which B.C. could move towards reducing emissions by 33 percent by 2020.

Pendakur described the NDP’s opposition to the carbon tax as “really disappointing” and questioned the legitimacy of James’s arguments against the Liberals’ plan.

“They say it is unfair because people who are not living in cities have to pay this tax even though they don’t have a public-transit alternative,” Pendakur began. “And then they say it is unfair because poor people spend a large fraction of their income on energy and so they have to pay.”

“Both of these harshnesses are true,” Pendakur conceded. But he argued that they can also be easily nullified.

The NDP argues that rural populations do not have the public transportation options of city dwellers, Pendakur said, so with a carbon tax, there is a concern that people living outside of cities will be forced to pay more to drive personal vehicles but will not have a cheaper, environmentally-friendly alternative.

The solution, according to Pendakur, is to simply increase the climate action tax credits that rural constituents are already receiving from the Liberal government.

Similarly, Pendakur continued, another NDP argument claims that because low-income households spend a greater percentage of their income on energy, a tax on energy disproportionately affects B.C.’s poor.

Again, this constituency is already receiving tax breaks as part of the Liberal strategy to curb emissions. “If you are worried that low-income households are hurt by this, pay them more,” Pendakur said. “The tax credits are already being mailed out and are there; you just have to mess with the numbers.”

Shane Simpson, NDP environment critic and candidate for Vancouver-Hastings, defended the party’s decision to favour a cap-and-trade plan over a carbon tax.

“It’s a system that provides more certainty because it sets the level of emissions and then brings the emissions down,” Simpson said, “versus a carbon tax, which puts a price on [carbon] and then hopes the price is significant enough to change behavior to reduce emissions.”

In a telephone interview, Simpson told the Straight that a tax credit cannot sufficiently alleviate the burden that a carbon tax places on low-income and rural voters because the rate of inflation outpaces the current rate of tax break increases.

Simpson said that the carbon tax also bears costs which are not always apparent and so cannot easily be offset by tax credits. For example, he said, with a carbon tax, the cost of transporting goods can increase, which can be passed on to grocery stores and then on to consumers. At the end of the line, you can have low-income families paying more for groceries.

“It just happens that people who have the smallest footprint, which is people in the lowest 20 percent of incomes, will end up being the people who pay,” Simpson said. “And they’re the ones who have the least ability to pay.”

And then there is the question of whether a carbon tax can even work to decrease emissions, Simpson argued. He described the Liberal approach as putting a price on pollution and simply hoping that price has the effect of changing people’s habits.

Pendakur said that if the NDP doesn’t think that the Liberal carbon tax will work to curb emissions, its response should not be to abolish it, but to increase the tax and give more tax breaks.

“That’s the solution,” he said. “It’s not, ”˜Get rid of the tax’. It’s, ”˜Compensate the people that you are worried about until you feel they are compensated enough’.”

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